As I said last time, one thing beyond pedalwork and registration that I hadn't expected to be difficult on the organ is articulation. And fingering.

I managed to buy myself a nice old copy of Ars Organi - a rusty tutorial book which smells of old churches. In in there are tons of finger-torture exercises. Some for finger stretching, other for 'substitution' - if you want to get a good legato, and in the absence of any sustain pedals, you have to be able to hit a key with one finger, then swap to another while the first finger goes off elsewhere. Not easy.

It's all the opposite of the piano: On a piano it's a big no-no to cross over any fingers except the thumb. On the organ, everything crosses over everything! And there are exercises for thumb glissandos.

The most painful so far has been arpeggios with just fingers 4 & 5, with finger substitution, which for C major gives this:

C(4), E(5->4), G(5->4), C'(5), G(4->5), E(4->5), C(4)

Ouch.

That aside, my organ tutor is away for the whole of April, and is probably going to move to France in June. Not going to leave much time!

Homemade pseudo-political billboard poster: "Increase global warming, say no to nuclear! People prefer the certainty of polluting the atmosphere for everyone rather than the tiny risk of a nuclear accident near where they live".

Now that Switzerland (or the politicians) has decided to abandon their nuclear power stations, reality is slowly starting to filter through: notably that they are going to need to build several gas-power stations to compensate: "if people don't reduce their consumption" - which is really going to happen, of course.

As I've already implied here, everyone is an ecologist until it starts to hurt. The problem in this case is that the lead time on a nuclear power station is so long that by the time it hurts, it will be too late to do anything about it...

Monday, April 16, 2012

Last week I made the most of the long weekend and did a bit of 'school' with Kalia. We played at shopping. She was very surprised: "it's like a game!". She had great fun with the dialogue, as each 'customer' spoke a different language.

Ici un début de nombres au carré...

I got her counting the number of squares in some 'square' numbers. Not sure what the aim was, except to give a her 'feel' for numbers and patterns of numbers.

Après, sortie détente.

The weather wasn't great (after an almost cloudless March, the grue of Easter weekend was a shock to the system!), but we went out anyway.

Electric batteries should be interchangeable, modular and standardised.

InterchangeableYou should be able to recharge batteries, without immobilising the car. Instead of driving into a service station, plugging in your car and waiting for half an hour (every 150km...), you'd drive in, have you battery pack swapped by a robot, and carry on straight away.

Of course there would be 'confidence' issues to resolve (swapping a badly treated battery for a new one), but it should be manageable.

ModularIf you're only doing 10 mile trips to work and back, you don't want to lug around 300 kg of excess battery. Your car shouldn't have just one battery pack, that you have to change in one go, but multiple smaller packs, which allow you to swap out any you know you won't be needing.

Standardised Right now, when you go to a petrol station, you don't have to go to a 'Ford petrol' pump, a 'Renault petrol' pump or a 'Nissan petrol' pump. In the future, when you go to your 'electric station', ideally you don't want to have to bother with differences either.

Currently, if I have correctly understood, at least the recharging plugs and sockets on electric cars are standardised, so it's a good start...

Over Easter, questions about how come I wasn't at work provided the occasion to talk about Jesus with the girls. It's an enormous challenge for me to try to 'explain': on one hand, with kids you can't go off into philosophical considerations, on the other hand if you just 'stick to the facts', you risk completely missing the meaning of it all (assuming one actually grasps what the meaning is!).

On Sunday afternoon we were out walking and Kalia looked up into the sky (sky=ciel=heaven in French) and said "Jesus, where are you? I'd like you to come down here so I can see you".

This really touches me, partly because I fear (me of little faith) that there's not much chance of her getting the answer she wants.

But it also makes me think about me: I'd like to see Jesus too, see him really being really here. But yet, there's a part of me which is more comfortable with the distance which is born of 'doubt': if Jesus was really here, physically next to me, would I carry on living the same way? Probably not. So this ambiguity has me thinking.

Completely by chance, I saw a few bits of the Jesus of Nazareth film over the weekend too. There is also a paradox in there: on one hand, it helped me to better project myself into the physical reality of his being here on earth, on the other hand it brought out even more clearly the enormous distance between his reality then, and our reality now, 2000 years later...

I heard someone say that this March had more sunny days than July normally has. We've tried made the most of it. On Saturday I did a 'play area crawl' with the girls, and yesterday we had some friends round for lunch and went for a stroll with them in the afternoon.